Obama plans meetings on Middle East

Israeli, Palestinian leaders to be in U.S. for U.N. assembly

JERUSALEM — After a frustrating week of shuttle diplomacy in which the Obama administration failed to persuade Israelis and Palestinians to renew peace talks, leaders of the two sides are heading to the United States to make their cases again that the administration should push the other harder.

President Barack Obama will meet tomorrow in New York with Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president. The Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, will also be in New York. Today, Israel's defense minister, Ehud Barak, will meet in Washington with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and other officials.

The White House said it did not expect to achieve any breakthroughs, but senior administration officials said Obama decided to go ahead with a meeting on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly to show his determination to get the process moving again.

“This is the next step in a determined diplomatic process that started on Day 1 of this administration,” said Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman.

Palestinian leaders say the sources of the frustration could not be clearer: Israel's refusal to freeze settlement building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in keeping with earlier commitments, and its insistence on holding peace talks without agreeing to deal with the key issues of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees.

“Without a settlement freeze or an agreement to talk about the core issues, there is no point in starting the negotiations,” Saeb Erekat, the top Palestinian negotiator, who is also going to New York, said by telephone. “Ask Netanyahu if he is willing to negotiate on Jerusalem and on refugees. He refuses. And we all know that if he ever accepted, he would lose his governing coalition.”

Netanyahu's coalition is largely right-wing and pro-settlement.

Israeli officials say they will seek to focus American attention away from settlements and on what they consider the real issues: Iran's nuclear ambition and Palestinian intransigence.

“I fear the Palestinians are going to miss a huge opportunity,” Barak said by telephone. “There is a president who says determinedly, ‘I am going to put my political capital into making sure there is an independent Palestinian state and solve all the core issues in two years.’ If we bear in mind Israel's security needs and the demand that a final agreement means an end to the conflict, this is an opportunity that must not be missed.”

Israeli officials acknowledge their unwillingness to stop all Israeli building in the West Bank, but said this was because the lives of Israeli settlers must go on until a deal is reached.

Another top Israeli official said that the Palestinians should not object to the construction of kindergartens or other new public buildings inside existing settlements because if those settlements are ultimately transferred to the Palestinians, those buildings would go to them.

Erekat said that the Palestinians did not want Israeli kindergartens, they wanted their land.

Tomorrow, Obama plans to meet with each side separately before seeing them together.

While administration officials acknowledge that the president's special envoy, George J. Mitchell, has not been able to close the gaps between the two sides, they point out that Israel voted in a new government soon after Obama took office, and that tensions in the region were still high from the war in Gaza. Given where it started, these officials insist, the situation has improved.